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Wednesday, September 30, 2015

For now, here's the press release on the five proposals chosen for further study. Full blog post later tonight or tomorrow.What I learned in describing so many of the proposed missions is how creative and scientifically compelling the many (28 in total of which there was some public information on perhaps 20) proposals were. I hope that we will see the missions not chosen in the next Discovery competition planned to start in two or three years.

NASA Selects Investigations for Future Key Planetary Mission

NASA has selected five science investigations for refinement during the next year as a first step in choosing one or two missions for flight opportunities as early as 2020. The submitted proposals would study Venus, near-Earth objects and a variety of asteroids.

Each investigation team will receive $3 million to conduct concept design studies and analyses. After a detailed review and evaluation of the concept studies, NASA will make the final selections by September 2016 for continued development leading up to launch. Any selected mission will cost approximately $500 million, not including launch vehicle funding or the cost of post-launch operations.

"The selected investigations have the potential to reveal much about the formation of our solar system and its dynamic processes,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “Dynamic and exciting missions like these hold promise to unravel the mysteries of our solar system and inspire future generations of explorers. It’s an incredible time for science, and NASA is leading the way.”

NASA's Discovery Program requested proposals for spaceflight investigations in November 2014. A panel of NASA and other scientists and engineers reviewed 27 submissions.

The planetary missions selected to pursue concept design studies are:

Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) DAVINCI would study the chemical composition of Venus’ atmosphere during a 63-minute descent. It would answer scientific questions that have been considered high priorities for many years, such as whether there are volcanoes active today on the surface of Venus and how the surface interacts with the atmosphere of the planet. Lori Glaze of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the principal investigator. Goddard would manage the project.

The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS)VERITAS would produce global, high-resolution topography and imaging of Venus’ surface and produce the first maps of deformation and global surface composition. Suzanne Smrekar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California is the principal investigator. JPL would manage the project.

PsychePsyche would explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid Psyche. This asteroid is likely the survivor of a violent hit-and-run with another object that stripped off the outer, rocky layers of a protoplanet. Linda Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona is the principal investigator. JPL would manage the project.

Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam)NEOCAM would discover ten times more near-Earth objects than all NEOs discovered to date. It would also begin to characterize them. Amy Mainzer of JPL is the principal investigator, and JPL would manage the project.

LucyLucy would perform the first reconnaissance of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, objects thought to hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system. Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado is the principal investigator. Goddard would manage the project.

Created in 1992, the Discovery Program sponsors frequent, cost-capped solar system exploration missions with highly focused scientific goals. The program has funded and developed 12 missions to date, including MESSENGER, Dawn, Stardust, Deep Impact, Genesis and GRAIL, and is currently completing development of InSight. The Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama manages the program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

Sometimes planetary exploration is drama and new vistas: Seeing the
most distant planet for the first time, a harrowing landing on Mars, the fight
for survival of a probe lost on a comet.
Much of planetary science, though, builds up from many quiet
measurements that provide crucial insights that can change our understanding of
the solar system and our world’s place in it.
Today’s post is a about a group of proposed missions that fall into that
latter category.

(Oh, and before anyone reminds me that Pluto is no longer a “planet”,
there are scientific classifications and personal ones. Pluto emotionally will always be the planet
on the distant edge of the solar system for me.)

One of the knottier problems in planetary science is understanding the
origins of Earth’s water. In the infant
solar system, a temperature gradient existed extending from our star to the
outer solar system. Close to the sun,
rocky materials with high melting points could have condensed. Somewhere, possibly in the region of the
mid-asteroid belt, it became cool enough for water ice to condense. In the far outer solar system, even materials
that are gases on our world would have frozen out to create, among other
features, the plains of frozen nitrogen found on Pluto by the New Horizon’s
spacecraft.

In this model, our early planet fell on the wrong side of the dividing
line – referred as the snow line – for water to have condensed and become part
of our world. In one sense the Earth remained
a dry world with much less than 1% of its mass as water. By comparison, the asteroid Ceres on the
other side of the snow line may have as much as 50% of its mass in water,
liquid or frozen.

Yet on the Earth’s surface, water is abundant in our atmosphere, soils,
and oceans with perhaps several times as much water again contained in the
rocks of our planet’s crust and mantel. How
was this critical substance delivered to our world?

Scientists have long suspected that the Earth’s water was delivered
from somewhere in the outer solar system by icy bodies colliding with the
proto-Earth. But from which region of
the outer solar system? And what dynamic
processes perturbed those bodies into collision courses with our rocky inner
world?

Karen Meech from the University of Hawaii puts the
importance of this science this way.
“The compelling question to learning how Earth got its water isn’t just
about the Earth. If our solar system was
somehow special and required a special architecture to deliver water to our
world, what does that say about the thousands of worlds around other
stars? Would planets in the habitable
zones around these stars have water to support life? This question impacts the big question of ‘is
there anybody else out there?’”

We won’t be able to answer this question until we have
analyzed the chemistry at bodies that represent several potential sources of
water and volatiles for our own solar system.
At least three teams of scientists are proposing missions to explore these
bodies.

Water is abundant in our solar system especially in the worlds that
formed beyond the snow line. Ceres is
one example of asteroids on the far side of the line with substantial water. Many of the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,
and Neptune have vast quantities of water.
Comets and the worlds beyond Neptune, of which Pluto is the largest
example, have substantial water. The
Earth’s water could have come from any of these regions, or perhaps a
mixture. There’s also the possibility
that the rocky grains that condensed to form the Earth absorbed some of the
water vapor surrounding them, or that water was made on Earth’s surface when hydrogen
in our planet forming disk combined with molten rocks on Earth’s surface.

If this sounds like a messy problem, it is. The solution to finding the sources of the
Earth’s water lies in chemistry. Water
itself varies in its isotope composition between normal water with hydrogen atoms
containing no neutrons and the much rarer tone neutron hydrogen, deuterium. The
ratio of these two water types, abbreviated to D/H, varies among the bodies of
the solar system. (You can read about
D/H ratios in two Wikepedia articles here
and here.) The
smallest ratios are found at Jupiter and Saturn, followed by Uranus and
Neptune, and then primitive meteorites.
The Earth, Mars, a few comets, and interestingly Saturn’s moon Titan
have similar D/H ratios. Saturn’s moon
Enceladus, however, has a higher ratio.
Some comets have D/H ratios similar to Earth while others have higher
ratios.

Examples of D/H ratios in water for a number of solar system bodies. References to the Oort cloud and Jupiter family refer to different groups of comets. Credit: ESA.

Finding an icy body with D/H ratio similar to Earth’s suggests that it
could have formed in the same region as the bodies that supplied water to Earth
because the amount of deuterium that gets captured in molecules is a sensitive
function of temperature. That, though,
is just the beginning of the detective work. Early in the solar system, the
orbits of the giant planets migrated in and then out again. In the process, they scattered many of the
smaller bodies around the solar system (and ejected many from the solar system
altogether). The goal is not just to
find bodies with similar chemistry to the Earth’s water but to also look for
clues as to where these bodies might have originally formed before they were
scattered.

Chemistry again should provide the critical clues. Isotope ratios such as those of 17,18O/16O[xygen]
and 15N/14N[itrogen] along with the amounts of noble
gases such a krypton and argon can reveal clues such as the temperature at
which a body formed or the distance from
the sun where it formed. Comparing
different groups of isotopes and elements will allow scientists to explore
multiple lines of evidence.

To explore the origins of Earth’s water, scientists need to deliver a
capable chemistry lab to different worlds that are the remaining
representatives of early reservoirs of water and volatiles. Three teams, two American and one European
are proposing missions to do this to their respective low cost planetary
programs (the Discovery program for NASA and the Medium class program for ESA).

The core instrument for all three proposed missions would be a mass
spectrometer. These instruments sniff in
gases or vaporized grains of ice and then “weigh” the distribution of their molecules
and isotopes. The two NASA missions
propose to use a cutting edge advanced mass spectrometer, MASPEX, that is both
highly sensitive to trace amounts of material and can measure large complex molecules. MASPEX has been selected for NASA’s Europa
mission and is proposed to be used by at least three Discovery missions (the
two discussed in this post plus one that would study the gasses emitted by
Saturn’s moon Enceladus). The specific
mass spectrometer for the European mission isn’t specified. (For a brief and easy to read overview of
mass spectrometers, check out this
document from JOEL USA, which manufactures commercial instruments. You can read a technical overview of the
MASPEX instrument here.)

Comet Harley 2 as imaged during a flyby by the Deep Imact/EPOXI spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Primitive Materials Explorer (PriME) Discovery mission would return
to comet Hartley 2, which was briefly studied during a flyby with the Deep
Impact/EPOXI spacecraft, for an extended study.
Measurements by a European space telescope, Herschel, measured the D/H
ratio for this comet and found that it is similar to Earth’s oceans.

The other two proposed missions would travel to an entirely different
potential source of Earth’s water. Several
asteroids, including Ceres where Dawn is now exploring, have been observed by
telescopes to emit dust and water vapor.
Five asteroids emit so much dust,
forming a comet-like tail, that they are called main belt comets (MBCs). Because the dust comes off the MBCs every
time they make their closest approach to the sun, it is clear that heat is
causing water to escape, pushing dust from the surface.

Artist conception of asteroid 24 Themis and two small fragments of this dynamical family, which resulted from a large impact more than one billion years ago. Note that one of the small fragments is inert (as most asteroids are) and the other has a comet-like tail, produced by the sublimation of water ice from its surface. Credit: Gabriel Pérez, Servicio Multimedia/IAC

Telescope measurements of one of the larger (~200 km diameter) and more
distant main belt asteroids, 24
Themis, suggest that there may be water ice with some organic compounds on
its surface (see the press release here). Conveniently, past collisions have chipped
off pieces of the parent asteroid, potentially allowing scientists to examine
material that potentially previously lay beneath the surface. One of those chips, tiny (estimated 0.6 km
diameter) asteroid 238P/Read has been observed to have strong,
comet-like outgassing, suggesting that a recent impact may have uncovered
an ice layer or pocket.

The proposed Discovery Proteus mission would explore the 24 Themis
asteroid family to study it as a source of Earth’s water. The spacecraft would first flyby Themis
itself, studying its surface composition and structure with copies of the Dawn
mission’s cameras. It would also measure
the composition of any gases being emitted from the comet with its MASPEX mass
spectrometer. Later during a months-long
rendezvous with Read, the Proteus spacecraft would measure the composition of emitted
water vapor and any organics with its MASPEX mass spectrometer in exquisite
detail.

The third proposed mission that would search for the
origins of Earth’s water, Castalia, was proposed for Europe’s fourth medium-class mission,
but not selected. The mission may be re-proposed
for the upcoming fifth mission competition.
In its original form, the proposed mission would have visited a
different main belt comet, asteroid 133P/Elst-Pizarro. If the mission goes forward, it may change
its target to another main belt comet.

Dr. Meech, who is also the Principal Investigator for the
team proposing Proteus, makes the case that flying to a main belt comet rather
than to a standard comet would better help us understand how Earth got its
water. Scientists develop dynamical models to understand the process of
planetary growth. Many models predict
that as the giant planets formed, they moved, tossing the smaller icy
planetesimals that would become comets and water-rich asteroids and main belt
comets both inward and outward. “These models make specific predictions about
where asteroids with ices formed and where comets formed. The distances over which the icy asteroids
formed are much better constrained; comets on the other hand could have formed
over a wide range of distances making them less diagnostic of a formation
location.” The models suggest that it would have been easier for asteroids to
have delivered the quantity of water on the Earth than standard comets.

Reading through the summaries of the missions reminded me of the
incredible discipline scientists proposing Discovery missions must
exhibit. The Castalia mission was
proposed to fly with ten instruments. In
the European system, the ESA budget doesn’t cover the costs of instruments,
which are instead paid for separately by the nations that develop them. As a result, low-cost European planetary
mission proposals tend to be instrument rich.

In the NASA system, instruments developed by US teams must be paid for
out of the mission’s budget (although any instruments contributed by another
nation are paid by that nation’s government).
As a result, the Proteus mission would carry just its multi-color
cameras and the MASPEX instrument. The
PriME mission would carry these two instruments plus a duplicate copy of the
JIRAM imaging infrared spectrometer developed originally for the Juno Jupiter
mission and contributed by Italy. Compared
to the imaging infrared spectrometer that the OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission will
carry (as an example of an optimized instrument for a small body mission), the
JIRAM instrument is both lower resolution (for the technically minded, an
instantaneous field of view of 240 mrad
versus 4 mrad)
with a narrower spectral range (2.0-5.0 mm
versus 0.4 – 4.3 µm). For the PriME
mission team, however, the JIRAM copy is free.

An imaging infrared spectrometer would also be useful
on the Proteus mission, especially to study the surface of asteroid Themis
during the flyby. I asked Dr. Meech why
her team didn’t add this instrument. “We
are putting state of the art technology into the mission with the mass
spectrometer, and that means it is expensive. Also because of the long
transit times for solar electric propulsion missions the mission operations are
very long compared to other comet missions - which increases cost. The
key science requires the mass spectrometer. An imaging spectrometer would
be very nice but that would not make the breakthrough science we hope to
achieve.”

However, NASA does allow some leeway on instruments,
and teams can propose optional instruments that NASA could chose fund to add to
enhance the mission’s science and also demonstrate technologies or educate
students. The PriME mission could also
carry a student-led plasma instrument.
For the Proteus mission, JPL is proposing a mission enhancement that
would use a CubeSat to make infrared spectral measurements at Themis. (Cubesats are spacecraft that for planetary
missions can be as small as a loaf of bread.)
The scientific measurements would be valuable in their own right, but
this enhancement would also demonstrate the use of a CubeSat to work with a
mother craft and the design of the spectrometer sized for these tiny
spacecraft.

A summary of the possible enhancement to the Proteus mission that a CubeSat daughter craft might make.The spectrometer would make measurement in visible and near infrared (0.5 – 2 µm) wavelengths. Credit: JPL/Caltech

As I said at the beginning of this post, the question
of how water was delivered to the Earth is one of the most important in
planetary science, both to understand the history of our world and to
understand the mixing bowl that was the earliest solar system. Eventually, we will fly missions to comets
that have D/H ratios similar to Earth’s such as Hartley 2 and to main belt
comets to see if they could be the sources of our water and to explore these
bodies as fascinating objects in their own right.

However, if either PriME or Proteus is selected, we
won’t see millions of people flooding the internet to learn what the D/H and
other isotope ratios are. These are
examples of the less media-star missions that perform critical science to help
us understand our world and the solar system.

Given 28 Discovery proposals, the odds of any one have
the right match of compelling science, low engineering risk, and low budget
risk and being the one selected is small.
If it came down to these two and I had a vote (not that NASA would ever
be crazy enough to do such a thing), I’d lean towards Proteus because I’d like
to see a new class of world. However,
the scientific case for both are compelling to me.

If you are interested, an article
from the March 2015 Scientific American magazine discusses the science behind the
questions of the origins of the Earth’s water in more detail.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

I’ve followed NASA’s Discovery program for low-cost planetary missions
($450M) since its inception in the early 1990s.
Missions have been proposed study worlds from Mercury to Saturn. In the current competition to select the 13th
mission, there’s a new class of mission proposed – missions that would directly
seek life, or failing that directly assess the habitability of two worlds that
appear to have the ability to support life.

Scientists believe three conditions are needed for life as we know it:
liquid water, access to a range of elements and minerals essential for
metabolic activity, and energy that can be exploited to power the chemical
reactions needed to power life. Currently,
only three locations beyond our Earth are believed to combine all of three. Jupiter’s moon Europa appears to have the
right combination with a vast ocean under its ice shell, key elements contained
in the rocky inner world at the bottom of the ocean, and energy provided by the
immense tidal heating created by Jupiter.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus similarly appears to have a liquid ocean beneath
its icy shell that is in contact with a rocky core, but the source of the energy
that keeps its ocean liquid is debated. The
third location is the vast northern plains of Mars where a layer of near-surface
ice is believed to warm periodically to allow liquid ice that could support
life that exploits the chemistry of the surrounding soil.

The northern plains of Mars from NASA’s Phoenix lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/University of Arizona

The vast oceans of Europa show great promise, but they are locked
beneath an icy shell that is at least several kilometers thick. It will take a series of expensive missions
to unlock that world’s mysteries.

Enceladus, however, conveniently has active plumes that spew the
contents of its ocean into space where a spacecraft can taste its contents
simply by flying through the jets. The
Enceladus Life Finder mission proposes to search for life in this moon by doing
just that. (One observation suggests
that at least occasionally Europa may also have plumes, but diligent follow up
studies have failed to confirm that finding.)
You can read about the Enceladus proposal in a previous
post.

Artist concept of the IceBreaker lander on Mars. Credit: NASA

The IceBreaker mission would seek life on the northern plains of
Mars. In many ways, this mission is a
direct follow on to NASA’s Phoenix mission that previously explored this
expanse. The Phoenix mission confirmed
that an ice layer lies just a few centimeters below a coating of soil. A class of chemicals, perchlorates, could
provide a source of chemical energy to sustain life. As the orientation of Mars’
axis wobbles, the climate changes approximately every 125,000 terrestrial years
to allow substantial periods of warmer summers at the Phoenix site – possibly
forming liquid water. In between
these warm periods, life could hibernate or subsist in films of briny water on
soil particles. (A number of terrestrial
microbe exist in briny films in extremely cold environments.)

The distribution of water in the upper layers of Mars’ soil based on gamma ray measurements made from Mars orbit. The northern and southern regions of Mars appear to have substantial ice layers below a covering layer of soil. Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/University of Arizona

Mars, even in on its northern plains, is a harsh word where any life likely survives in extremely marginal conditions. On the Earth, life is so ubiquitous that it literally everywhere and changes the chemistry of our soils, atmosphere, and oceans. Ubiquitous life is unlikely at Mars or we’d have seen its chemical signature. (The presence of trace amounts of methane gas in the atmosphere may be a chemical signature of life but it could also result from abiotic geologic processes.)

A few locations on the Earth, however, are so harsh that life barely
hangs on makes few changes to the surrounding chemistry. Two such locations are the extraordinarily
dry desserts of the Atacama Desert along the central Pacific coast of South
America and the dry valleys of Antarctica.
Another habitat is the deep subsurface of the Earth’s crust where
metabolic rates are so slow that the microbial organisms may reproduce only
every 100 to 1000 years.

The team proposing the IceBreaker mission bets that life arose in the
distant, early eons of Mars when the climate was warmer. Or, alternately, life from Earth may have
been delivered to Mars in meteorites blasted from the surface of our early
world by asteroid strikes. As Mars lost its atmosphere and became dry and cold,
the adaptability of life may have allowed it to persist in locations such as
the northern plains where the climate periodically becomes mild. The Curiosity rover’s discovery of organic
molecules in its currently dry equatorial location provides support for the
hypothesis that Mars once supported either life or at least pre-biotic
chemistry.

To explore for life, the
IceBreaker mission would carry three instruments that perform overlapping
measurements to explore the landing site’s chemistry. The key instrument would be a laser
desorption mass spectrometer built by a team at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight
Center. Mass spectrometers “weigh”
molecules within samples, and the distributions of weights allow scientists to
estimate what the original substances were.

Four previous landers – the two Vikings, Phoenix, and Curiosity – have
carried mass spectrometers to Mars to search for organic molecules. Their efforts have been skunked, however, by
the ubiquitous presence of perchlorates.
These molecules form on the surface of Mars when UV radiation cause
chlorine and oxygen to react. The
resulting family of molecules make good rocket fuels, but are also food sources
for many terrestrial microbes.

Unfortunately, when soil samples with perchlorates are heated, the
perchlorates chemically react with any organic molecules and destroy them. (To put it more colloquially, the
perchlorates and organics burn up together.)
All the mass spectrometers delivered to Mars to date have attempted to
use heat to bake the organics out of the soils so they could be measured, which
triggered the reaction with perchlorates that destroyed any organics in the
samples. (The detection of organics at
the Curiosity site by its mass spectrometer is the result of clever instrument
manipulation to work around the perchlorate problem.)

The European 2018 ExoMars rover will use the first mass spectrometer
sent to Mars designed to work around this perchlorate trap. Its mass spectrometer, built by the Goddard
team, will use a laser to vaporize tiny portions of samples to release organic
molecules without triggering a reaction with the perchlorates. The IceBreaker lander would carry a copy of
this mass spectrometer.

A second instrument, the
Signs of Life Detector (SOLID) would search for a several dozen complex organic
molecules that are key to the functioning of the simplest unicellular organisms
on Earth. These molecules are essential
to storing genetic information, performing basic metabolic functions, and building
cellular structures. If any of these
molecules are present, then they will react with antibodies within the
instrument’s sample slides. A laser beam
will scan the slides, and any positive reactions will result in a bright glow
detected by an imager. The position of
the glow(s) on the slides would indicate which molecules are present.

The operation of these
two instruments would be synergistic. An
analogy helps explain how they would work together. Imagine that you wanted to determine whether
a possible race of Martians were bakers making breads, cakes, tortillas,
etc. The mass spectrometer would be the
generalist instrument that could distinguish whether the building blocks in
food samples were for a meat, vegetable, or a baked good. You might suspect that the Martians might
make baked goods similar to those on Earth – if a recipe worked in one place it
might work well in another. The SOLID
instrument would detect if specific baked good – cupcakes or bread -- were
present. If the instrument detected one
or more of these baked goods, you can be pretty certain that bakers exist on
Mars. Of course, Martian cooks might invent
their own unique families of baked goods without terrestrial equivalents. Then the mass spectrometer could suggest the
presence of baked goods by detecting the basic ingredients necessary.

The IceBreaker’s third instrument would be an updated version of
Phoenix’s Wet Chemistry Laboratory. As
the name implies, this instrument would add water to soil samples and then
determine what chemicals in the soil would be available for use by any
life. The availability soluble forms of
the building blocks of life as we know it – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
and sulfur – as well as oxidants that can serve as energy sources would imply a
habitable site. (The Phoenix version of
this instrument discovered the presence of perchlorates.)

NASA’s Phoenix lander found ice immediately below the surface soil. Over the course of several days, the ice sublimated and disappeared from images. Credit: NASA/University of Arizona

The lander’s drill would allow scientists to explore the relationship between
the periodic swings in climate on the northern plains and both its habitability
and the preservation of the organic biosignatures of life. Over time, the axis of Mars wobbles – the
technical term is precession – much as the axis of a top does. For our home world, the gravity of our large
moon dampens the precession. Mars lacks
a stabilizing moon and the tilt of its axis can swing chaotically from 0 to 60
degrees (it is currently 25 degrees, almost the same as the Earth). The result is that the climate on the
northern plains can range from frigidly cold to being able to melt the layer of
ice beneath the coating soil down to depths of a meter or more.

Any life present in the northern plains presumably would thrive during
the periodic warm spells (estimated to occur about every 125,000 years in the
current epoch). As the climate cools,
the ice refreezes, locking any biosignatures in place. Then two processes work to destroy any
organic material. Ultraviolet light
would destroy any organics immediately on the surface, and as the covering soil
layer is churned, much of it is likely cleansed of any signs of life. Deeper down in the ice layer, cosmic
radiation penetrates to slowly destroy organics.

The IceBreaker lander would carry a drill that could bring material to
the surface from as deep as one meter.
It will provide samples of both the soil and the ice at different
depths. Shallower ice would have melted
during moderate climate warming but also would lose its organics more quickly
to the accumulated damage from cosmic radiation. Deeper ice would represent periods when the
warmest climates melted the buried ice and would also protect organics
longer. By taking samples at different
depths, the mission’s scientists would be exploring the questions of life, habitability,
and the preservation of biosignatures across time.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, IceBreaker is one of two
proposed missions that would directly search for life. The other, the Enceladus Life Finder (ELF),
would fly through the plumes that are venting the contents of that moon’s ocean
into space. While the specifics of these
two missions are very different given the differences in the worlds they would
explore, the scientific approach would be similar. The ELF mission also would carry a mass
spectrometer that would directly measure the presence of any complex organic
molecules that would suggest the presence of life. This mass spectrometer plus a second one designed
to measure the composition of dust particles would explore habitability of
Enceladus’ interior ocean by looking for key resources. The combined measurements also would help
scientists better understand the conditions within the moon. (The Cassini orbiter at Saturn carries
versions of these two instruments, but the ELF’s instruments would be far more
sensitive.) An optional third instrument
would, like the IceBreaker SOLID instrument, analyze the plumes for more complex
organic molecules, although the method (microchip capillary electrophoresis)
would be quite different.

I don’t envy the teams of scientists evaluating the Discovery proposals
for NASA. How do you, for example,
decide that the science that can be performed by a radar mapper of Venus is
more important than long term telescopic observations of the bodies of the
outer solar system or the exploration of a class of asteroids that has never
previously been visited (to mention just a sample of the diversity of missions
in the current competition). If either
IceBreaker or ELF found solid evidence for life, then it would among the top
discoveries in human history. But what
if they don’t find life or the results are ambiguous? How would their potential results minus a
discovery of life rank against those of other missions? Those review panels have a tough job.

Both IceBreaker and ELF have their own unique challenges, too. The IceBreaker mission would use the same
lander design as the Phoenix and upcoming Mars InSight missions, so it would
seem to me that it has a high probability of fitting within the budget cap ($450M)
for Discovery missions. However, when
the InSight mission was selected as the previous Discovery mission, there was serious
grumbling in the planetary science community about NASA having too much of a
focus on Mars since the 2020 Mars rover mission had just been selected. Selecting a third Mars mission in a row may
present a political problem. The ELF
proposal, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. No Discovery mission has flown past the
asteroid belt. Its proposal team has the
challenge of convincing NASA that a mission to the Saturn system can be done within
the cost cap.

Evaluating these missions will fall to review teams and NASA managers
with the expertise to make the tough calls.
(My favorite proposals reflect my personal and idiosyncratic preferences
about which worlds most interest me.) This
time, they have two choices for missions to directly search for life. At least one, IceBreaker, has a high
probability of being able to fit into the Discovery program.

Betting on the fortunes of any of the 28 Discovery proposals is a risky
proposition. The message I take from
IceBreaker and ELF is that we know where and how to directly search for
life. Whether either proposal prevails
in this competition, I expect that in the next decade or so a mission will be
selected to taste the ices of the northern plains of Mars or Enceladus for the
signature of life.

While many teams proposing missions for the Discovery program are reluctant to say much about their proposals, the IceBreaker team has been more open than any other team that I recall. Do an internet search for 'Mars IceBreaker' and a number of documents, many of them extended abstracts for conferences, will come up. Here are two links you might start with:

About Me

You can contact me at futureplanets1@gmail.com with any questions or comments.
I have followed planetary exploration since I opened my newspaper in 1976 and saw the first photo from the surface of Mars. The challenges of conceiving and designing planetary missions has always fascinated me. I don't have any formal tie to NASA or planetary exploration (although I use data from NASA's Earth science missions in my professional work as an ecologist).
Corrections and additions always welcome.